Social Video Marketing Options: Instagram or Vine?

Video and social media are hot content marketing tools, so which social video platform -- Facebook's new video capability for its Instagram photo-sharing app, or Twitter's Vine looping-video app -- give the most bang for your marketing buck? A recent MarketingProfs article by Russ Somers, vice president of marketing for Invodo, provides an interesting head-to-head comparison. When it comes to how well Vine and Instagram connect brands with viewers, he deems the winner to be Instagram since Vine's six-second video limit may be too short to tell a story, while Instagram offers fifteen seconds, basic editing capabilities, and the important ability to upload video from an iPhone. (Android phones, however, do not currently have this functionality.) How about reach? Vine lags with 40 million users compared to Instagram's 150 million, although Somers cautions that 100 million of the Instagram users are not necessarily all video fans since they joined before Instagram added video. Aggregated user-generated video content is a selling point for both platforms; it offers marketers a two-way channel of communication. If the goal is strictly to aggregate UGC, Instagram wins, even though brands aren't yet leveraging the video aspect of Instagram effectively, Somers rules. However, some of the best UGC campaigns, engaging fans on both digital and physical levels, are appearing on Vine, like Nissan's #VersaVid Vine campaign in which users printed out a paper Versa from a special site, folded it into shape, and created Vines featuring their paper car. The ease with which users find video content is another key marketing factor. Though both platforms allow the use of hashtags, they differ in other ways: Vine features categories and trending topics on their Explore screen, while Instagram encourages serendipity (merchandising of featured content). Those differences probably matter less than social media integration -- with Twitter (Vine) and Facebook (Instagram) -- which accounts for the majority of content discovery and works equally well for both apps. Somers concludes: If marketers have to choose only one, Instagram's bigger potential audience and story-telling advantage give it the edge. For the article, go to
http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2013/24073/instagram-video-vs-vine-which-is-the-video-marketing-champ